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ABSTRACT
In the seventeenth century, when the modern Self emerged in the shape of a self-assured Cartesian cogito, a radically opposite movement of ‘emptying’ or ‘deconstructing’ that Self took place. The religious subject, having become modern, understood its ultimate aim as becoming selfless. The battlefield on which the new subject fought the fight with its own modern condition was the issue of ‘love’. ‘What is the status of his Self when it is involved in the act of love?’ was the central question in seventeenth century religiosity. This essay examines the early modern idea of pur amour and focuses only on two voices in the Querelle Du Quiétisme, François de Fénelon (1651–1715) and Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715). Fénelon vehemently defended the pur amour, a concept he adopted from a century-long tradition of spirituality in France and which he tried to explain and legitimize in a systematic and theoretical way. Malebranche was highly critical of that tradition, but refused neither to use the term nor to refer to the ideal of pur amour. His interpretation of the Self, however, forced him to draw different conclusions on the nature of pure love.
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Notes
1. ‘Have we made ourselves? Do we belong to God or to us? Has he made us for us or for him?’ de Fénelon, Oeuvres I, 658; my translation.
2. See, in this volume, Drever’s chapter on Augustine, and Raunio’s on Luther.
3. See also Poljakova’s discussion of the death of God in Nietzsche and Dostoevsky.
4. This is the main object of the work of Michel de Certeau; see for instance: de Certeau The Mystical Fable.
5. Gondal, Madame Guyon (1648–1717). See also Gorday, François Fénelon, 67–97. For an English translation of her writings, see Guyon, Selected Writings.
6. de Civitas Dei XIV, 28; Augustine, The City of God, 477.
7. Camus, La défense du pur amour contre.
8. Piny, L’oraison du coeur. The year of the first edition of l’oraison ducoeur ou lamanière de faire oraison parmi les distractions les plus crucifiantes de l’esprit is 1683.
9. de Fénelon, Maxims of the Mystics. In 1799, without the author’s consent, Télémaque was published, a novel Fénelon wrote in the early nineties for his pupil, the Duke of Burgundy. The book containing a lot of hidden criticism on the king and his war politics must have been one of the reasons why the king maintained the order that prohibited Fénelon to leave his diocese.
10. de Fénelon, Selected Writings, 240. For the original French text, see de Fénelon, Oeuvres I, 1035. This sentence is quoted and commented on in Terestchenko, “La querelle du pur amour au XVIIe,” 177.
11. Maybe the first explicit expression of pur amour (without using the term) is to be found in Francis de Sales’ Treatise on the Love of God (IX,4), first published in 1616: ‘she [the ’indifferent soul‘, freed from any (self-)interest] would prize hell more with God’s will than heaven without it; yes, she would even prefer hell over heaven if she perceived only a little more of God’s good pleasure in the one than in the other, so that if by supposition of an impossible thing she should know that her damnation would be more agreeable to God than her salvation, she would give up her salvation and run to her damnation’. De Sales, Oeuvres, 770 (my translation,).
12. de Fénelon, Selected Writings, 240, and Oeuvres I, 1035. This is one of the propositions condemned by the Rome Magisterium in 1699 (de Fénelon, Selected Writings, 352, note 58).
13. de Fénelon, Selected Writings, 216, and Oeuvres I,1008.
14. de Fénelon, Selected Writings, 217, and Oeuvres I, 1009.
15. de Fénelon, Selected Writings, 218, and Oeuvres I, 1011.
16. de Fénelon, Oeuvres I, 656; my translation.
17. Proverbs 16: 4: ‘universa propter semet ipsum operatus est Dominus impium quoque ad diem malum’ (Vulgate); ‘The Lord has made all things to himself: yea even the wicked for the day of evil’ (The Bible, 736).
18. See note 16 above.
19. Ibid.
20. de Fénelon, Oeuvres de Fénelon Archévêque-duc, de Cambrai, 156–57; my translation.
21. For an analysis of the sadistic component in the pur amour – and its parallel with, for instance, the love of O in the famous twentieth century erotic novel Histoire d’O (History of O), see De Kesel, “Pur amour.”
22. ‘He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love’ (1 John 4: 8; The Bible, New Testament, 295).
23. This is illustrated in a sentence from Madame Guyon: ‘Essential to God’s glory is only that glory itself and the felicity that belongs to this, and which God finds in our destruction [et sa propre félicité qu’il sait trouver dans notre destruction]’. Quoted in Terestchenko, Amour et désespoir, 129.
24. de Fénelon, Oeuvres I, 610; my translation.
25. See the quote from Terestchenko, Amour et désespoir, 129.
26. This might be one of the reasons Fénelon and Guyon were widely read in Protestant countries, certainly in America where they still have a certain popularity (see Ward, Experimental Theology in America).
27. The text of Lamy (1636–1711) that has provoked Malebranche’s criticism is de La connaissance de soi-même [On the Knowledge of Oneself, a five volumes edition published between 1694 and 1698], and more precisely the last chapter of Volume III. It is included in the edition of Malebranche’s most important text written against Lamy’s pur amour theory: Traité de l’amour de Dieu (1697); see Malebranche, Oeuvres de Malebranche, tome XIV, 122–31.
28. Malebranche, Oeuvres de Malebranche, tome V, Treatise on Nature and Grace, and Oeuvres II, 1–189. For Fénelon’s review, Réfutation Du système Du père Malebranche sur La nature et La grâce [Refutation of Father Malebranche’s Systematic Account of Nature and Grace], see de Fénelon, Oeuvres II, 327–505. Bossuet was disappointed after reading Fénelon’s text: ‘I was not satisfied with it, and I think the author will rework it [l’auteur le réformera], for he is a modest man, and his intentions are pure’ (cited in de Fénelon, Oeuvres II, 1488). That text therefore also contains the core of the disagreement between Bossuet and Fénelon.
29. The Traité is composed of three ‘Discourses’, each of them containing a series of ‘Articles’, and as many ‘Additions’ (explanations). These additions are not included in the English translation (Malebranche, Treatise on Nature and Grace).
30. Malebranche, Treatise on Nature and Grace, 111, and Oeuvres II, 10.
31. That earlier work is Recherche de lavérité [Inquiry of the Truth], 6 volumes, published in 1674–1675; English translation: Malebranche, The Search after Truth.
32. Malebranche, Oeuvres II, 9; my translation.
33. For this and the following quotes, see the passage cited above; Malebranche, Oeuvres II, 9; my translation.
34. de Fénelon, Oeuvres II, 331.
35. Malebranche, Oeuvres II, 1049, and Oeuvres de Malebranche, tome XIV, 4; my translation.
36. Ibid.
37. Malebranche, Oeuvres II, 1049–50, and Oeuvres de Malebranche, tome XIV, 4; my translation.
38. ‘In the beginning was the Word [Logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ (The Bible, New Testament, 114).
39. This is why, according to Malebranche, God is not a voluntaristic God and neither is his will arbitrary: God ‘wills […] not with a purely arbitrary will, but with the invincible love he has for the unchangeable Order’ (Malebranche, Oeuvres II, 1051, and Oeuvres de Malebranche, tome XIV, 9, my translation).
40. Malebranche, Oeuvres II, 1051, and Oeuvres de Malebranche, tome XIV, 9, my translation.
41. Malebranche, Oeuvres II, 1052–53, and Oeuvres de Malebranche, tome XIV, 10–11, my translation.
42. Malebranche, Oeuvres II, 1067–68, and Oeuvres de Malebranche, tome XIV, 27, my translation.
43. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
44. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 191–204; and De Kesel, Eros and Ethics, 121–61.
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Notes on contributors
Marc De Kesel
Marc de Kesel (PhD in philosophy) is Scientific Secretary and Senior Researcher at the Titus Brandsma Institute, Radboud University Nijmegen (The Netherlands). He is doing philosophical research in fields such as Theory of Religion and Mysticism, Holocaust Reception, Freudo-Lacanian Theory. He published on the ethics of psychoanalysis (Eros & Ethics, Albany, 2009), on the critical core of monotheism (Goden breken [Breaking Gods], Amsterdam, 2010), on the logic of gift-giving (Niets dan liefde [Nothing but Love], Amsterdam, 2012), on Holocaust reception (Auschwitz mon amour, Amsterdam, 2012), and on Slavoj Zizek (Zizek, Amsterdam, 2012).